Julia Child cooks up a batch of primordial soup and explains how these simple ingredients produce amino acids – the building blocks of life. This video played in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Life in The Universe gallery from 1976 until the gallery closed.

Dahl is a sadistic creep who was severely abused as a child. From reading his Dahl’s biography “boy” it’s easy to see where he, and so many other British authors, get their twisted ideas from; the harsh and cruel British Gulags aka boarding schools.
Roald Dahl loves to write stories about tormented, punished, starving, suffering children (and adults for that matter, too). I don’t think British people like children, period.

This book is for ADULTS THAT DO NOT LIKE KIDS. All the kids are bad besides Charlie Bucket, and for some odd reason all the adults besides the Buckets are fat. All the kids get punished because they do something wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, and there are bad words in the book that should not be used. So that is why I rate this book with one star, and if I could rate it lower I would.

I thought this book was not very good. Nobody died because of the oompa-loompa. The characters were very stupid. I didn’t like augustus because he ate to much. The arguing was o.k.

I read this book when I was young and was disturbed by it. It is not a kid’s book. It is a book by an adult ABOUT children, not FOR children.

This book paints a very negative picture of children. With the exception of the main character, all of the children are bad and are punished in cruel ways for their faults. Are most children fundementally bad and deserving terrible punishment, at the moment they least expect it? This book suggests it (especially to a child who might be reading it and cannot understand what “social commentary” is yet). This book fits right in with the Omen and Rosemary’s Baby. It is a child-exploitation story.

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

His A People’s History of the United States is one of the most important books of my life and had a profound impact on shaping how I would view history of not just the United States, but of the world.

Banana ketchup or banana sauce is a popular Filipino condiment made from mashed banana, sugar, vinegar, and spices. It is often colored red to resemble tomato ketchup. Banana Ketchup was made when there was a shortage of tomato ketchup during the World War II, due to high production of bananas.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Less than two weeks after converging upon the site of a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake, American anthropologists have confirmed the discovery of a small, poverty-stricken island nation, known to its inhabitants as “Haiti.”

Located just 700 miles off the southeastern coast of Florida, the previously unaccounted-for country is believed to be home to an estimated 10 million people.

Even more astounding, reports now indicate that these people have likely inhabited the impoverished, destitute region—unnoticed by the rest of the world—for more than 300 years.

“That an entire civilization has been somehow existing right under our noses for all this time comes as a complete shock,” said University of Florida anthropology professor Dr. Ben Oliver, adding that it appeared as if Haiti’s citizens had been living under dangerous conditions even before the devastating earthquake struck. “Of course, there have been rumors in the past about a long-forgotten Caribbean nation whose people struggle every day to survive, live in constant fear of a corrupt government, and endure such squalor and hunger that they have resorted to eating dirt. But never did we give them much thought.”

Added Oliver, “Had it not been for this earthquake, I doubt we would have ever noticed Haiti at all.”